| Happy Solstice, Everyone!/Go out and Orgy/Have delirious fun! |
[Jun. 21st, 2007|12:44 pm] |
Book reviews, nonfic . . .
Terry Glavin, The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among The Lost and Left Behind. I must confess I haven't entirely finished it yet, but I LOVE this book! I think it shall almost certainly be the best/my favorite nonfiction book I read this year. It's a depressing as hell topic, not just the accelerating into the abyss pace of extinctions among animal and plant species and sub-species, with the focus on specific examples and causes, but also the growing lack of diversity amongst humans even as we multiply like Agent Smith in the Matrix (my metaphor, not his, so don't blame the book if you hate it!). (Not that some human cultural extinctions aren't of the good -- we really didn't need foot binding or thumb screws, and we can't get honor killings, female genital mutilation, gay-bashing and a million other awfulnesses extinct soon enough . . . )
But how can you not love a book on these things that includes such passages as "It's wilder up that way . . . There is the Sruthanalunacht, the Stream of New Milk, which once ran white with milk but long ago it turned to water, they say, when a woman washed her feet in it. There are people who live at Cloonusker who say that at the end of the world, the final battle of the last war will be fought up there, above Gortaderra, in a place called the Valley of the Black Pig, and on that last day of battle the Stream of New Milk will turn to blood. . . William Butler Yeats was haunted by these things, and just as the world was carrying the great weight of dread and foreboding in his apolocalyptic poem, "The Valley of the Black Pig," so it was when I began writing this book . . . I can also confidently report that the roads and boreens that wind their way through the East Clare hills do not lead inevitably northward beyond Fossamore into the Valley of the Black Pig."
Meaning, of four possible ways of dealing w/our present future situations, two of them get us into said Valley, i.e. things permanently fucked up awfully, and two of them are more hopeful. And the book itself is hopeful even as it is awful in its catalog of human destruction, and poetic even as it discusses the pros and cons of zoos and genetic engineering and the tragedy of the "living dead" species that still exist but due to habitat/numbers loss are almost certainly doomed to not exist that much longer, w/chapter titles such as "The Last Giants in the River of the Black Dragon" and "An Apple is a Kind of Rose" and "The Singing Tree of Chungliyimti". It could be something will happen in the remaining half of the book that will make me not love it, or even hate it, but at this point surpasses Farthing as my most-loved book of the year.
Helen Caldicott, Why Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.
James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: The Climate Crisis and The Fate of Humanity.
Reviewing these together because the authors reference each other, and take fundamentally opposing views as to the best way out of our environmental catostrophe. I must say, she makes by far the more compelling (and more detailed) arguments, both in favor of solar (which Lovelock skips over in about a page, essentially saying "I can't imagine we can get as much power as cheaply that way as from nuclear" w/out much further discussion) and against nuclear.
( Read more... )
Deep Economy, Bill McKibben. ( Read more... ) |
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